Ease your garden into the chilly season

Your garden doesn't need to be kept perfectly tidy like a living room. A little mess is natural, says gardening expert Donna Balzer.

Photograph by: Gavin Young
, Calgary Herald

Housework is nothing like gardening. If you vacuum in the morning, the deed is done for days. If you rake leaves on a fall morning, chances are you'll do it again, possibly the same day.

This little conundrum doesn't mean gardening is bad - just different. In fact, I think the lack of tidiness factor in gardens is overrated. Nature has built a system for leaf disposal: you can let your leaves build up, and organisms will pop by to deal with them for you. That's not going to happen when you leave dust bunnies under the bed.

Birds gather berries, leaves decompose and dead branches drop off trees and are colonized by mushrooms. Systems are in place to take care of all the little things gardeners think they have to do themselves.

The trouble is, most gardeners' appearance expectations are a little higher than what nature can provide. We can't wait for leaves to decompose or blooming plants to wither back, so we rake and remove leaves in fall. To avoid random seedlings, we cut back blooms. We want our yards to be like our homes: neat and tidy.

If you feel like getting outside and into the fresh air, gardening beats housework as easily as rock beats scissors. Clip and save these dos and don'ts for the garden this fall and work on them as you have time or inclination.

Do

- Water shrubs, trees, perennials and lawn well. If they dry, they die.

- Keep woody-plant trimming to a minimum.

- Cut back messy or seedy perennials but clip plants with architectural interest in spring instead. Ignore soft plants like hostas and day lily - they simply melt into the ground over winter.

- Cut and compost annual flowers after they freeze.

- Cut lawns for the last time. Raise the bar on your mower to the highest level with the goal of evening off rather than shaving.

- Spread wood chips to a depth of 6 cm to 8 cm this fall if the soil in shrub beds was dry or cracked at any time this summer, and repeat this every third or fourth year.

- Spread a 4 cm layer of finely composted wood or mixed-source compost on flower beds to protect soil surface and soil life.

- Use up homemade compost so bins can be cleaned out and used again over the winter.

- Save your leaves. The back of flower beds, a vegetable garden or a composter is a better place for leaves than the garbage. Keep a few garbage bags aside for next summer's compost pile.

- Plant a few fall vegetables such as lettuce, spinach and garlic. They will sprout in the spring before you would ever dream of seeding them.

Garlic can be bought from local farmers' markets.

- Remove one-third of soil from large ceramic flowerpots and compost it. Store pots away from outdoor stairs and other spots that need to be clear for shovelling. If you are not sure if they are frost tolerant, store pots under a cover to avoid freeze-thaw damage.

- Have your irrigation system blown out - even if you need to keep hand watering. The system needs to be blown dry so that water doesn't rupture pipes over winter.

- Create new flower beds or vegetable beds for next spring by spreading old newspapers on the lawn and covering them with leaves and a 4 cm layer of compost or soil.

Don't

- Let plants wilt or soil dry and crack even in late fall.

- Cut back hydrangeas as if they were perennials or prune anything this time of year that blooms before late June, such as forsythia, early roses and lilacs. Enjoy blooms in spring before you prune them.

- Leave piles of leaves on the lawn over the winter unless you want to kill the lawn. (See the note above about how to create new flower beds.)

- Spread bags of redwood bark or other coarse, chunky bark on any ornamental bed.

True bark chips are waxy, resist breakdown and repel water.

- Overclean beds by removing or blowing off every leaf.

The random bits of leaves and perennials left standing protect bugs and organisms that are beneficial for your garden over winter. n Worry about fertilizers. Water-soluble fertilizers added now will simply leach into the water table and cause pollution. n Pull out herbs that might be semi-hardy.

Sometimes sage, parsley and lavender keep on giving until late in the season.

- Forget to enjoy strolling in the park, kicking leaves and smelling the scent of overripe crab apples. Fall is fabulous.

Balzer speaks and writes about gardening. She is coauthor of No Guff Vegetable Gardening and a regular guest on CBC radio. Check out her blog at donnabalzer.blogspot.com.

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